


Zero-Sum Game

by MaddyHughes



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e07 Digestivo, Hannigram - Freeform, M/M, all the feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 10:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4432418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaddyHughes/pseuds/MaddyHughes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternative ending to Digestivo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zero-Sum Game

Cordell had told the absolute truth. The stuff he injected into Will immobilized his body, but it was not an anaesthetic. Will couldn’t move, but he could feel everything.

Every single damn thing.

Hannibal carried him for miles in the snow. He smelled of blood and his clothes were caked with it, but that scent had been in Will’s nostrils for so long now that he barely noticed it. There was a smell of scorched flesh: barbecue. At first Will wondered how and when he himself had been burned but as Hannibal carried him out past the borders of Muskrat Farm, beyond the sound of gunfire and out a service entrance in the fence, he realized that the smell was coming from Hannibal. 

Hannibal had been cooking. Or perhaps…he had been cooked.

Will couldn’t ask. His tongue was fat and lazy in his mouth, his limbs useless. He dangled heavy in Hannibal’s arms and heard the rasp of his breathing. Felt the steady gait of his body. He kept walking and did not stumble.

 _I’m Fay Wray,_ thought Will. _Dangling limp in the arms of the monster._

_He saved me. Why?_

_In Florence, he was about to kill me._

Cordell had screamed, but not for long. Will had heard the echoing screams of Mason from far away. Hannibal had probably killed many others, to get to him, to get them both out. Will found that he didn’t care about those killings.

But he did care about why Hannibal wasn’t killing him. Surely the only reason he had saved Will was because he couldn’t stand the indignity of Mason getting to Will first? 

Maybe that was why. So that Hannibal could continue his vivisection at leisure, in private.

Miles, they went. Miles in the snow. Will lost track of the time but he did not lose consciousness. He was awake and he kept expecting Hannibal to speak. That was one of the things Hannibal did best, after all. Talking. Analysing. Explaining and obfuscating, with his truth which was also not the truth. Will expected some sort of monologue as they walked, like a self-styled tragic hero explaining himself to the audience.

Hannibal didn’t say a word. He walked, and he breathed. He didn’t stumble.

Eventually, he paused and put Will down in the snow. Now he’ll kill me, thought Will, gazing up at the shadow of the other man, but he thought it without fear. Hannibal merely turned away, out of the reach of his vision, and Will heard a metallic click. Moments later he was lifting Will again and laying him gently across the back seat of a car.

After he’d hot-wired the ignition he drove in silence, as well. Will kept waiting for the effects of Cordell’s drugs to wear off and they didn’t. He didn’t sleep, either. He watched the back of Hannibal’s head as he drove. Steady. He remembered trips in his father’s battered-up station wagon across state, when Will would lie across the back seat where there weren’t any seat belts and watch his father’s head and the lights of the cars they passed float away on the car’s ceiling.

He knew when they were in Wolf Trap not by anything concrete like sight or smell, but by the way he felt.

Hannibal carried him inside his own house. Like a groom carrying a bride across a threshold. The house was nearly as cold as the outside and it was empty of dogs. Hannibal put him carefully down on the bed, covered him with a blanket, and from the sounds of it, started up the furnace. 

On the bed, he drifted a little, but when he did he saw Cordell’s scalpel and Mason waiting to receive his face and he woke up again, his chest hitching with the effort to breathe more quickly. Hannibal’s footsteps in his house were quiet. They paused, and approached him. He felt Hannibal’s cool hand on his forehead. He looked up and for the first time, met Hannibal’s gaze.

Hannibal looked at him for a very long time. Will thought he knew the emotion he saw there. But it was not an emotion which made sense. Not any rational sense at all.

Hannibal got up and Will heard him running a bath. The house was warmer by now, and the water would have heated up too. Hannibal would want to bathe, of course. The man was like a cat in his habits. He would want to wash his victims’ blood off of him and emerge, clean and fresh, the victor.

The taps turned off. Hannibal reappeared. He took the blanket off Will, folded it, and began to unbutton Will’s borrowed shirt.

His attention, his absorption, was absolute. He unbuttoned it with care and pulled it, slowly, off Will’s shoulders and down his arms. He dropped it on the floor and Will couldn’t see his face but after a long moment he felt Hannibal’s fingertips on his belly. Tracing the line that his own knife had made. One side of him to the other, dipping downwards, smiling upwards. Admiring his work.

Smoothing the scar as if it were something precious and rare. His fingers left a line of warmth that spread out through Will’s body.

He unbuckled Will’s belt and unfastened his trousers, pulled them down along with his underwear. From the sound, he dropped these on the floor, too. He took off Will’s socks. He laid his hand, one by one, on the bruises and cuts on Will’s skin from his fall from the train. On the marks on his wrists and ankles from Mason’s restraints. On all the wounds that Will had sustained coming after him, trying to find him, and the punishment for having found him at last.

Last, he peeled off the makeshift bandage that Cordell had put over the cut on his forehead. Will could see Hannibal’s face now but Hannibal didn’t meet his eyes. He looked at the damage he had wrought. His attempt to get into Will’s head. 

Then he stooped and picked up Will again: one arm around his chest, the other in the crook of his knees. He carried Will to the bathroom, turning sideways to get him through the door. He laid him in a warm fragrant bath. The water enveloped him like an embrace.

He said nothing. He knew Will was awake, though unmoving, but he said nothing at all. He bathed the blood off of Will’s skin with the least threadbare of Will’s washcloths. He washed Will’s hair, careful to keep the suds from the wound on his forehead, as softly as if Will had been a child. He cleaned between Will’s fingers, between his toes, behind his knees and elbows, in the crease of his thighs. His touch was not sexual but neither was it clinical. It was tender. Like Christ bathing his disciples, like a someone bathing their spouse who had come back from war. 

In the bathroom the sound of the water was loud, the drip of the tap and the sound Hannibal’s hand made as it dipped into the bath and rubbed the washcloth on Will’s skin.

Was this the last time they would be able to talk? Was that why Hannibal wasn’t saying anything?

Or was it, maybe, because he knew that Will couldn’t answer?

Hannibal lifted him out of the bath. He dried and dressed Will with the same care and attention. He tucked Will into his bed and as Will lay with his head on his own pillow, in the home that he had left so that he could seek Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal paused.

Will felt Hannibal’s breath on the side of his face. He felt Hannibal’s lips hovering a fraction of an inch from his temple. Ready to whisper, or to kiss.

He did neither. He stepped away from the bed, and Will heard the water running again in the bathroom. 

He closed his eyes and fell into some sort of sleep. He didn’t dream of scalpels or the feeling of Cordell’s cheek between his teeth or the whine of the bone saw and the vibrations it made in his skull. He didn’t dream of anything.

With the monster in the house, he felt safe.

**

He woke to Hannibal’s voice, not near. Hannibal’s voice calm, and he could only discern the cadence and tone of it, not the words. His own mind supplied the words.

_If I saw you every day, forever, Will, I would remember this time._

He opened his eyes. His body was his own, again. He could move. It was light outside, the fragile light of late afternoon in winter. The door to his house opened and Hannibal came in. Will sat up.

Hannibal did not say a word. He unbuttoned his coat and took an open book from the bed beside Will. It was full of equations, written in a neat hand. He had been sitting near Will, as he slept, watching him. Thinking.

Equations and formulae. A recipe to turn back time. Will didn’t have to ask. He understood. Despite it all, the forgiveness and blood, maybe because of it all: he understood. 

Hannibal sat down in a chair pulled up to the bed, and Will sat back against the window, wincing.

‘Do we talk about teacups and time,’ Hannibal said, ‘and the rules of disorder?’

‘The teacup’s broken. It’s never going to gather itself together again.’

‘Not even in your mind?’ 

Hannibal did not express regret; that was not in his vocabulary of emotion. His voice held, instead, hope.

Hope. Will had to swallow. Hannibal had _hope_? After all this?

‘Your memory palace is building,’ said Hannibal. ‘It’s full of new things. It shares some rooms with my own.’

Will nodded. The Norman Chapel in Palermo: severe and beautiful and timeless, with a single reminder of mortality in the skull graven in the floor. Hannibal Lecter’s office, with hundreds of stories and minds falling in paper snowflakes through the air. In some ways, he would never leave these rooms. Could never leave these rooms again.

‘I’ve discovered you there,’ Hannibal added, ‘victorious.’

Oh, Will was not victorious. He was tired and sore. He was finished, he was finished with this. He wanted an end, a safety. He wanted to be clear, his body his own, his mind his own.

‘When it comes to you and me,’ he said, ‘there can be no decisive victory.’

‘We are a zero-sum game.’

_We are creation and death. We are pain and pleasure, joy and despair. We are beginning and ending. We are two, and one, and none. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose. A zero-sum game._

‘A zero-sum game,’ whispered Will. ‘If we can’t win, and we can’t lose, does that make us…free?’

His body was his again. It would do what he wanted it to. His mind had been reset. Not to turn back time; not to unshatter a teacup, or erase any hurts. 

Just to be done with it.

He held his hand out to Hannibal.

Hannibal took it. 

He knelt on the bed, and Will stretched himself up. He saw the scars on Hannibal’s face. He put his hand on the back of Hannibal’s neck and he realized that he had never deliberately touched Hannibal, never freely put his hand out and touched him. Not once, in all this time.

Will tilted his head up, and Hannibal bent his head down, and Will felt Hannibal’s breath on him. Quick, and unsteady, as it had not been when Hannibal had carried Will for miles in the snow.

When their lips met, Will saw, finally, what he had been travelling across the world for. The conjoinment he had intended, without knowing it. Neither a victory nor a defeat, but a perfect understanding. Their own ending. His and Hannibal’s, together.

He kissed Hannibal and he felt all of the pain and all of the joy, too.

When they parted, Hannibal smiled at him and he felt an answering smile on his lips. Hannibal put a hand on either side of his face; stroked his cheekbones gently with his thumbs. He kissed Will’s forehead, beside the cut that he had made in Florence. With infinite tenderness.

‘This is freedom,’ he said. ‘For both of us.’ 

Outside, it had started to snow. Out of the corner of his eye, Will caught a flash of blue, but then Hannibal was kissing his lips again.

Blue. Blue in a flash, in a light, like—

His eyes, which had been closed with the kiss, opened and he saw the reflection of the blue flashes on the walls of his house. He tried to pull away from Hannibal’s hands, Hannibal’s kiss, but Hannibal held him tight and fast. 

‘Hannibal,’ he tried to say against Hannibal’s lips. Hannibal merely shook his head. Will heard the crunching of tyres on the gravel outside.

He pushed Hannibal away from him with all of his strength. ‘You need to go,’ he gasped. ‘Go, now. Please, right away.’

‘It’s not yet time,’ said Hannibal. He captured Will’s hand and kissed him on his wrist, where the pulse beat.

‘They’ll catch you! You need to—’

‘Go. Yes. I’ll go now.’ One last heartbeat, holding Will’s hand, and Hannibal stood. He buttoned his coat, as if he were going for a stroll, and instead of heading for the back door and the forest—the direction he could still run in, if he were fast and silent—he went to the front.

They were outside the front door, on the porch. Jack Crawford and his men. Will staggered to his feet and followed Hannibal, who was kneeling already on the wooden floorboards, his hands behind his head.

‘Congratulations, Jack,’ he was saying. ‘You finally caught the Chesapeake Ripper.’

‘I didn’t catch you,’ said Jack. ‘You surrendered.’

‘No,’ said Will. ‘No. Don’t do this, Hannibal.’

His feet were bare. He was shivering, reaching for Hannibal, trying to put himself between Hannibal and the future. An agent put his arm out and stopped him.

Hannibal turned his head and looked at Will. The same way that he had always, always been looking at Will. As Will had only a few minutes ago begun to truly understand.

‘I want you to know exactly where I am,’ said Hannibal to him. ‘And where you can always find me.’

‘A sort of safety,’ Will said, hardly hearing his own voice. But this didn't feel like safety. This felt like loss of something he had only just won.

‘You’ll be safe,’ said Hannibal. Snowflakes had settled on the shoulders of his jacket, and in his hair. ‘And we’ll both be free.’

‘Cuff him,’ said Jack. ‘Put him in my car.’


End file.
